clearings of the uplands that the population concentrated itself at the close of the Roman rule, and it is over these districts that the ruins of the villas or country houses of the Roman land-owner are most thickly scattered.

The cities of the province were, indeed, thoroughly Romanized. Within the walls of towns such as Lincoln or York, towns governed by their own municipal officers guarded by massive walls, and linked together by the network of roads which reached from one end of the island to the other, law, language, political and social life, all were of Rome. But if the towns were thoroughly Romanized, it seems doubtful, from the few facts that remain to us, whether Roman civilization had made much impression on the bulk of the provincials, or whether the serf-like husbandmen, whose cabins clustered round the luxurious villas of the provincial land-owners, or the yet more servile miners of Northumbria, and the Forest of Dean, were touched by the arts and knowledge of their masters. The use of the Roman language may be roughly taken as marking the progress of the Roman civ ilization; and, though Latin had all but wholly superseded the languages of the conquered peoples in Spain and Gaul, its use was probably limited in Britain to the townsfolk, and to the wealthier proprietors without the towns. tracts of country the rural Britons seem to have remained apart from their conquerors, not only speaking their own language, and owning some traditional allegiance to their native chiefs, but retaining their native system of law. Imperial edicts had long since extended Roman citizenship to every dweller within the empire; but the wilder provincials may have been suffered to retain in some measure their own usages, as the Zulu or Maori is suffered to retain them, though subject in theory to British law, and entitled to the full privileges of British subjects. The Welsh laws, which we possess in a later shape, are undoubtedly, in the main, the same system of early customs which Rome found existing among the Britons

Over large

in the days of Claudius and Cæsar; and the fact that they remained a living law when her legions withdrew proves their continuance throughout the four hundred years of her rule, as it proves the practical isolation from Roman life and Roman civilization of the native communities which preserved them.

II.

THE ENGLISH CONQUEST AND SETTLEMENT.-Gardiner. [At the beginning of the fifth century the Roman Empire was in a state of dissolution. The barbarian tribes had broken into it in many directions, and in 410 the Goths, under Alaric, took and sacked Rome itself. In the following year the government, needing all its available forces at home, withdrew its army of occupation from Britain. The Britons, thus left to themselves, remained nominally independent for sixty years. But, accustomed as they had so long been to imperial protection, they were unable to defend themselves. They were attacked from the north by the Picts and Scots, who had never been brought under the Roman sway, as well as by the Teutonic or German pirates from the south. The latter they invited to assist them against their northern enemies. Quarrels arose between them and their allies. The Teutons, among whom the Angles predominated, came in ever-increasing numbers. The natives made a desperate resistance. The struggle lasted a hundred and fifty years. At the end of that period the invaders had succeeded in establishing ten or twelve petty kingdoms on the soil of Britain.]

WHEN, in the middle of the fifth century, our Teutonic ancestors landed on the shores of Britain, they carved out settlements for themselves; they were Jutes and Saxons and Angles from the coast which stretches from Jutland to the mouths of the Elbe and Weser. Over the horror of the struggle a thick darkness has settled down, and, with the exception of one lightning-flash from a Celtic writer, it was only by its leading features, by a battle or a siege traditionally remembered, that any portion of it could be recovered when civilization and its power of recording events again spread over the land. At the end of a century and a half the Teu

tonic settlers occupied the whole of the eastern half of the land, from the Forth to the Straits of Dover, and from the coast of the German Ocean to the Severn. Over all this tract the Low German speech of the invaders was to be heard. To what extent the British population had disappeared is a matter of controversy. It is a point on which no certain knowledge is attainable. The invaders did not enter the island impressed with the dignity of Roman civilization. They knew nothing of the Roman speech. They seized upon the lands of the Britons. They stormed and sacked their cities. They probably carried off their daughters to be their wives or concubines. The men who resisted were slain as wild beasts are slain, without thought of mercy. Of the rest, some were reduced to slavery, some may have kept up a precarious independence in the woods. Under such circumstances a population suffers fearful diminution from misery and starvation. The weak and the old, with the young child, the hope of future generations, perish for lack of food. Yet, whatever the numerical amount of the survivors may have been, the general result is certain. The Teutonic speech, save in a few words used principally by women and slaves, prevailed every-where. The Teutonic law, the Teutonic way of life, was the rule of the land. The Teutonic heathenism was unchanged. The Celtic element, whether it was larger or smaller, was absorbed, and left scarcely a trace behind.

If the history of the settlement is to be gathered from scanty tradition, the character and institutions of the settlers have to be inferred from that which is known of them in their own land, and from that which is known of them later in the land of their adoption. Fierce and masterful as they were, they were not barbarians, except in antithesis to the civilization of Rome. The stage which they had reached was very much that of the Homeric Greeks, if we allow for the greater inclemency of a northern sky. Each tribe was

complete in itself. It had its own assembly of freemen, whose voice was decisive in regulating its actions. At its head was a chief, the ealdorman, as he was named, who guided its deliberations, and who, after its arrival in England at least, headed it in war. The freemen themselves were composed of two ranks, eorls and ceorls. The eorls, or nobles by birth, whose origin is lost in the mists of the past, had an honorary pre-eminence. Their voice was of greate' weight, their life was of greater value, their share of booty larger. But they did not make the State, though they had, doubtless, much to do with its direction. In fact, there was nothing that we should now call political life in existence. New legislation there was none. The old customs, handed down from father to son in Germany, were adhered to in England, and the only question which could arise for deliberation was whether some new expedition should be undertaken against the enemy. Outside the assembly, as well as within it, all freemen were equal, however much they might differ in influence or wealth. Each man had his own share of the conquered land, and his share of pasturage or wood-cutting in the folkland-the common land that had been left undivided. The organization of which he formed a part did not, as in the empire, reach from the State to the individual, but from the individual to the State. Each township which, in an ecclesiastical form, became the parish of modern days, made its appearance once a month, in the hundred mote, to decide quarrels and to witness contracts; while the members of the tribe met twice a year to decide matters of more general importance. As every man was a judge-unless, indeed, the practice of attending the hundred mote by a deputation of the reeve, or head man, and four best men of the township, had already been adopted-so every man was a soldier. The assembly was, in truth, the tribe in arms, and the eorls and the ealdormen could but lead, they could not constrain, the will of their fellow-tribesmen.

Left in the positions they had originally occupied, the tribes might have retained these institutions unaltered for centuries. The progress of the war necessitated expansion and amalgamation in order that greater force might be brought to bear on the enemy. As it had been with Rome

so it was now with the English tribe. The system of popular assemblies had reached its limit. The men of Dorset or the men of Norfolk could come up without difficulty to the place of meeting. The men of a State reaching from the Severn to the borders of Sussex could not come up. The idea of delegation, if it had as yet existed at all, had not acquired sufficient strength to suggest the idea of a general collective council. Recourse was had to a different factor in the commonwealth. Of all human occupations war requires the most complete discipline and the most prompt obedience to a single chief. Naturally, therefore, it was the chief, the ealdorman, who gained most by the changes wrought by war. Every-where he took the higher title of king, and in taking its title he gained a higher standing-point. He was the bond of union between many tribes. The ealdorman who now presided in the tribal assembly derived his authority from him, even if he owed his position to an older tribal authority. At the end of the sixth century some ten or twelve kingdoms existed, and the authority of the kings would, doubtless, tend to increase in civil matters as they grew more successful as leaders in war.

Yet, growing as it was, the king's authority was by no means absolute. The power which the king wielded could only be exercised in accordance with the wishes of the armed force, and that armed force was still, in great measure, composed of the contingents of the freemen of the several tribes. It is true that it was not so altogether. By an old German custom a great man had been accustomed to entertain a body of followers-gesiths, as they were called in England-who attached themselves, not to the tribe, but to the person of